Press

DDW: 'Dom Hemingway' Screens in New York
March 2014

At the Thursday night screening of the new Jude Law movie “Dom Hemingway,” there was an interloper on the red carpet. Lena Dunham was stepping and repeating.

The movie is a dark comedy that stars Law as a safe-cracker just released from prison and takes place in London, far, far from Brooklyn. Dunham wasn’t totally crashing the party. She had come to support the film’s director, Richard Shepard, who has directed episodes of Dunham’s “Girls.” Law and Dunham made for an odd couple at the Cinema Society- and Links of London-hosted screening at Manhattan’s Landmark Sunshine theater, but they seemed to have warmed up to each other quickly. Dunham even gave Law bunny ears during photos on the red carpet.

Dunham stayed just to pose for photos and share a quick chat with Law near the concession stand; she was off to the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where her boyfriend Jack Antonoff was playing his first New York show for his solo project, Bleachers.

Law, who described himself as a “weekly watcher” of “Girls,” gained 20 pounds for the part.

“It was just bad food at wrong times of the day,” he said of his weight gain. “Ice cream, Coca-Cola, lots of red meat.”

At the after party at Hotel Hugo’s Il Principe, an impossibly slender, statuesque beauty posed for a selfie with Karen Elson. The Romanian actress Madalina Ghenea, who is featured in the film, wore a very va-va-voom Emanuel Ungaro sheer blouse that was unbuttoned just to there, and easily upstaged the phalanx of supermodels and socials around her — Dree Hemingway, Elettra Wiedemann, Genevieve Jones and Allison Williams — not to mention Salman Rushdie.

“I actually had a very special moment on set,” Ghenea cooed, sipping a vodka martini. “I had to sing in front of Jude, Demian Bichir and Richard E. Grant, and I’m not a singer. I don’t really know how to deal with my voice.” Certainly, no one minded.

“Anyway,” she added modestly, all but batting her eyelashes, “it didn’t have to sound amazing. And it certainly didn’t sound amazing in the movie. But it was a weird, funny moment to deal with.” “Dom Hemingway” is the actress’ first English-language film — she has two previous Italian films to her credit and also has a role in a European TV series, “Borgia,” not to be confused with the Showtime series “The Borgias.”

“I come from a little town in the south of Romania,” she said. “My mother always dreamed to be an actress, and then she always wished that for me. She wanted to see me on the big screen, and this just happened and it’s unbelievable.”